Tag Archives: Media

Dystopia Fetishism and the Fall of #Solidarity

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Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, looking out at the cold world outside. And this is what I saw. I saw Laurie Penny’s Spider Jerusalem-esque piece for the New Statesman, covering the student riots, and I saw Wikileaks preparing to dump 250,000 classified US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sudden rush towards the horrid, glorious dystopia that as a British citizen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyndham et al.)

One of those retains the ability to stir up more trouble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approximately a socialist, and having voted for the Liberal Democrats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s broken election promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a government of the centre-Right, we were already seeing the people up in arms.

The violence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of protesters intent on stirring up trouble. The reaction of the protesters to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I wonder if they’ll be saying that this morning.

Last night, as it became apparent that the protests were ineffective at convincing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the proposal, some protesters attacked a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. Naturally, this made the front page of every newspaper in the country (Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Mirror, nice paywall there, Times).

The Twitter hashtag #solidarity has been used by the protesters and their supporters for a while now — I do hope some of that solidarity remains. But aside from amongst students, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remember their university days, I suspect that solidarity just took a massive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to student protests, but if they were quietly depriving them of column space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impressive acts of shooting oneself in the foot I have ever seen.

My greatest fear over the whole matter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the people whose education was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That breaking into Millbank Tower, that lighting fires and putting bricks through windows, that spraypainting walls and breaking down doors, that being kettled by riot police and attacking the Royal Family, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen people inside the House of Commons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and abandon what meagre trust remains in our politicians, hoping that by the time the protesters reach middle age they’re electable and their opinions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get kettled more viciously, dreaming of glorious revolution while all around the country turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to experience for two hours of a film or two hundred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.

Stuxnet is in the hands of Bad Guys?!

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Hey! Do you like fear? Do you like bullshit headlines? Well, has Sky got an news for you! “Super virus a target for cyber terrorists”, which bears the even more fascinating <title> tag of “Stuxnet Worm: Virus Targeted At Iran’s Nuclear Plant Is In Hands Of ‘Bad Guys’, Sky News Sources Say”, is their latest fantastical fearmongering piece. Let’s butcher it together.

(Thanks to Chris of Campaign Reboot for tweeting this story. He beat me to it with his post “Sky News, working hard to prove they’re morons”.)

So, shall we start from the top?

A super virus that was used to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme…

Potentially — though there has been no admission from the nation that it was successful.

…has been traded on the black market…

Got any evidence, Sky? No? Okay then. Granted it’s not infeasible, but it would be nice to know if you just made that up.

…and could be used by terrorists, according to Sky News sources.

CORN FLAKES COULD BE USED BY TERRORISTS! EVERYBODY PANIC!

Senior cyber-security figures have said the Stuxnet worm – the first to have been used to damage targets in the real world…

Almost certainly not, although the internet is not being helpful with sources of previous real-world virus damage (except to companies’ finances). There’s also no evidence that Stuxnet has caused any meatspace damage.

…could be used to attack any physical target which relies on computers.

Any physical target running Windows with attached SCADA controllers from one manufacturer controlling a certain number of frequency converter drives made by one of two companies running at certain frequencies. Unless they’re just referring to the Windows exploits Stuxnet uses rather than its payload, in which case… nope, every other OS is immune.(Source: Symantec)

The list of vulnerable installations is almost endless — they include power stations, food distribution networks, hospitals, traffic lights and even dams.

Again, Stuxnet in its known form will cause problems for none of those.

A senior IT security source said: “We have hard evidence that the virus is in the hands of bad guys — we can’t say any more than that but these people are highly motivated and highly skilled with a lot of money behind them.

You can’t say more because you’ve received threats from the FBI if you release this super-secret information that would be useful for protecting the world’s networks? Or because you’re making it up? Present evidence or GTFO.

“And they have realised that this kind of virus could be a devastating tool.”

Really?! Oh, gosh.

Will Gilpin, an IT security consultant to the UK Government said: “You could shut down the police 999 system.

“You could shut down hospital systems and equipment.

“You could shut down power stations, you could shut down the transport network across the United Kingdom.”

Again, I guess we’ve moved on to talking about a heavily modified payload rather than Stuxnet as it currently exists. And then, it’s only systems running Windows, and only until Microsoft patch the two (of five) remaining vulnerabilities that Stuxnet is known to exploit.(Source: F-Secure)

The Stuxnet attack on the Bushehr nuclear installation in Iran is believed to have been orchestrated by a country.

Believed on the basis of speculation, with no hard evidence.

Now experts warn that the West is extremely vulnerable to similar attacks by criminal gangs seeking blackmail payouts or more likely by terrorist groups.

Criminal gangs and terrorists that have extremely detailed inside knowledge of manufacturing systems, which are probably not a common target for either group, and who are dumb enough to rely on a virus that we now have an extensive dossier on, which most virus scanners now detect and neutralise, and for which there are known cleaning methods.

Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary with the US Department of Homeland Security, said: “They could shut down power systems, dams, almost any sophisticated industrial process that requires a control software. Which is practically everything.”

I think we’ve seen this point somewhere before.

There has been a rise in cyber attacks in recent years.

On April 8, 15% of all internet traffic was routed through China for 18 minutes in a mysterious incident the Chinese authorities have denied any part in.

Because it was probably an accident rather than an attack, and it’s not as if routing through China is unusual — the event was merely an unexpected spike. There has been no suggestion that any unencrypted sensitive data was intercepted by China during that time.(Source: BGPmon, plus the more knowledgeable comments on Slashdot and Reddit.)

The Royal Navy’s website was shut down on November 5, allegedly by a Romanian hacker.

In October, the UK Government declared cyber warfare to be a “tier 1″ threat to national security.

Are those… could they possibly be… facts?! My god.

But experts say a more co-ordinated effort is needed to tackle attacks, along the lines of the Cyber Command agency set up in the US this year.

It’s the most reasonable opinion in the article, and it’s the one you don’t provide a named source for?

So, er, thanks, Sky News. I feel so enlightened now.

If you’re looking for some more amusement, the YouTube-calibre comments section is pure Retarded Internet Commenter gold, too.

i-Dosing is a Thing Now?

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So, not only does October’s edition of Wired UK suggest 4chan in its list of unusual places to make friends online — yup, that would indeed be an unusual place to look — but it seems to have decided to enlighten its readers on the wonders of i-Dosing too.

Wait, what? i-Dosing is an actual thing now?

For anyone unaware, “i-Dosing” is purportedly a technique whereby teenagers listen to music that emulates the effects of taking drugs. There are a number of websites that claim to offer such music, and I suppose it’s possible that they actually existed as some kind of weird internet non-entity before the Daily Mail went fucking crazy (more so than usual) in July of this year. I wouldn’t, however, be surprised if the Mail article was a ludicrous prank on the reactionary truth-averse newspaper, and the websites sprung up in the aftermath.

(Somebody linked me to a couple of “i-Dosing” tracks back then. The first was a pretty minimalist early-Industrial kind of track, listenable but hardly trippy. The second was a poor mashup of early-2000s dance hits, which I turned off just for its abysmal production values.)

So congratulations to whoever gave the story to the Mail, it’s pretty hilarious in an “oh god the media sucks” kind of way.

To the i-Dosing kiddies, curse this new-fangled technology, grumble / pipe / slippers. What’s wrong with the good old two litres of Coke, some high-volume Prodigy and playing WipeOut 64 until it hurts to look away from the screen? (Or until your mum called you down for lunch, of course.)

And Wired, seriously, i-Dosing is not a thing. At least your sidebar item wasn’t a Mail-esque “OH GOD YOUR KIDS ARE ON DRUGS” piece, but please, can we all let this story die now?

Raoul Moat and the Facebook of Lulz

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For some unimaginable reason, two weeks and counting after the whole Raoul Moat business kicked off, it’s still plastered across the papers. Why? Because someone created a Facebook tribute page. Facebook refused to take it down. Then the owner removed it. Then someone made another one. Then the Prime Minister waded in. And one of Moat’s victims.

My question is, predictably: why the hell is all this Facebook stuff news?

There is one reason and one reason only why these Facebook tribute groups exist: for the lulz.

Have the Prime Minister and the tabloid press not managed to grasp that there’s not really some sinister or deranged bunch of people behind this? People join these groups for the lulz; because it’s funny. Do politicians really live in such a sheltered world that they’ve never seen what’s out there on the internet?

The internet is context-free interaction, a world where you can’t see your friends’ reactions or even know if they’ve seen a notification of you joining a group. It’s a single click to join, whether you’re doing it because you believe in the cause or whether you just found it funny. It’s a world where people try to take down religions just because the idea amuses them. It’s a world where nobody really cares; where “Serious Business” is only ever used sarcastically.

Government, media — getting offended by Raoul Moat’s Facebook fan club just makes you look ridiculous. It’s not just the internet you seem not to understand, it’s a whole aspect of human nature that comes to the fore in that kind of environment. Hell knows, if Cameron hit the roof about a Raoul Moat tribute group, what the hell is he going to do when he finds /b/? They’ll be scraping him off the walls!

I have no massive expectation of the most powerful to govern in a way which everyone would recognise as fair and just. But at the very least, can we not expect those in power to understand the people they represent?